Early in the summer of 1975, the Village Voice arrived in my mailbox bearing a Page 1 photo of a scruffy and cool Bob Dylan dressed in a leather jacket and white shirt with horizontal lines, his hair curled in the wild manner illustrator Milton Glazer would borrow when he designed the cover of Uncle Bob’s Greatest Hits Volume 1. Dylan’s arms were laced around a person I took to be Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. A cutline soon corrected me: Bob was hugging rocker Patti Smith.

The story was written by James Wolcott, who now scribbles a never-miss column in Vanity Fair and is author of the new memoir, “Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York.” His piece from almost 36 years ago was headlined: “Tarantula Meets Mustang - Dylan Calls on Patti Smith.”

My memory bank has Dylan and his partner looking as serious as sin, like two people caught in something, standing outside a real place named the Bitter End. But the picture I find in an Internet search has Patti Smith smiling, wearing a Keith Richards T-shirt and a chopped Keith haircut. Dylan’s grinning, too.

I’d later learn from reading so many Dylan biographies that Bob soon invited Patti to join him and the musical carnival that became the Rolling Thunder Review that fall, but she declined. That he aped her stage presence - punching the air and using the microphone as a foil - when he sang “Isis” live.

By the time the first leg of the Rolling Thunder Review was about to close in December 1975, her album, “Horses,” inspired by the Beat generation, French Symbolism, and the first track’s re-write from Van Morrison’s catalogue, was released.

“Horses” would inspire and influence U2 and REM, and, thus, popular music in the late 20th century. When Rolling Stone and Time magazine listed their best and most influential albums of the 20th century, Patti’s debut was included.

I can’t say I’m her biggest, or even most casual, fan. I’m mostly a fan of her great spirit.

There is something fascinating and inspiring about how she lives her life like it’s an art project. She’s dedicated a book her poetry to pulp novelist Mickey Spillane and Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards’ former girlfriend. She loves the TV show “Law & Order” and the poet Arthur Rimbaud. She’s pals with the Dalai Lama. Her son married Meg White of the White Stripes.

She honed her act at poetry readings and at the punk dump of CBGB’s on the Bowery. She quotes Jiminy Cricket. At concerts, where she treads the boards in bare feet, she now talks of the importance of good dental health. You can’t make this kind of stuff up.

Save for collaborating with Bruce Springsteen on the 1978 radio hit “Because The Night,” Patti never had big commercial success with her music. But she’s seen the world via touring - even opening for the Grateful Dead at Alumni Stadium during the 1979 spring fling at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Gilda Radner used to spoof Patti as Candy Slice on “Saturday Night Live.” Once Van Halen’s lead singer, even Sammy Hagar covered one of Patti’s songs. He also considered her a true artist.

By 1980, she retired, married, had two children and only returned to the rock world in the mid-1990s after the death of her husband, the guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, and brother, Todd. She was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.

Last year, Patti, a former clerk at the late, great Manhattan bookstore Scribner’s, earned the National Book Award for nonfiction for her memoir, “Just Kids,” the story of a New York City that no longer exists.

Patti always has been a poet. And, she’s been a photographer since meeting the late Robert Mapplethorpe more than 40 years ago.

An exhibition of her photography - “Patti Smith: Camera Solo” - opened last month at the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art in Hartford and will run through Feb. 19. Featured are 60 black-and-white prints created with her vintage Polaroid, a Land 250.

Captured are a spoon and fork that belonged to her (and Dylan’s) influence, French poet Arthur Rimbaud. The writer William Burrough’s bandanna and a life mask cast from the features of William Blake are other subjects, along with the beds of Victor Hugo, Virginia Woolf and John Keats.

“We spend so much of our lives in bed,” she told the Hartford Courant when the show opened. “We sleep in bed, we conceive in bed, we make love in bed. I work in bed. I watch ‘Law & Order’ in bed. A life bed or a death bed, a bed is a magical thing. There is no human in them, but they reek of human.”

Yet a photograph of her bed is not in the collection.

“My bed is so littered with crap,” she told the Courant. “My bed looks like a lending library, books, papers, lots of detritus.”